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Taylor Swift fans rushed to hear her newly re-recorded version of 1989 – the biggest-selling album of her career – after it was released overnight.
The demand for “Taylor’s version” of the 2014 album caused technical problems on some streaming services, Swifties reported on social media.
It’s the latest in a string of re-recordings by Swift, who wants to take back ownership of her old material.
Hits like Shake It Off are joined by five unheard tracks from the era.
One, titled Is It Over Now?, which includes lyrics about calling an ex-boyfriend a “lying traitor”, has led to fevered speculation about who she’s referring to.
The original album turned Swift into a bona fide superstar, winning the Grammy Award for album of the year.
Her ongoing project to revisit and reclaim her work started after music mogul Scooter Braun bought the rights to her past recordings in 2019.
The latest reconstruction dropped at 05:00 BST on Friday, and eager fans claimed at one stage it briefly “broke and crashed Apple Music and Spotify”.
What are the new songs like?
In 2014, Taylor said she had recorded more than 100 songs for 1989 – so the relative scarcity of vault tracks is intriguing.
Whereas previous re-recordings have featured full discs of bonus material, this album gets just five new additions: Slut!, Say Don’t Go, Now That We Don’t Talk, Suburban Legends and Is It Over Now?
As a whole, they feel like dry runs for the songs that made the cut. The melodies aren’t as crisp, the lyrics aren’t as sharp. Suburban Legends has a particularly clunky line about letting a partner’s indiscretions slide “like a hose on a slippery plastic summer”.
Slut! has piqued fans’ interest for its title alone – who might she be talking about? No-one, it turns out.
The song is thematically similar to Blank Space, commenting on the media’s portrayal of Taylor’s relationships: “But if I’m all dressed up / They might as well be lookin’ at us / And if they call me a slut / You know it might be worth it for once.”
The best of the new tracks is Is It Over Now. An angrier take on 1989’s philosophical break-up songs, it calls back to the Harry Styles snowmobile incident (see also, Out Of The Woods) then, deliciously, references the “Sad Taylor Boat” meme – a photo of Taylor fleeing a vacation alone after the couple split up.
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She goes on to refer to an ex as a “lying traitor”, accuses them of parading their new relationships in public, and notes that every new girlfriend looks like her. “If she’s got blue eyes, I will surmise that you’ll probably date her.”
Many fans have surmised that Styles is the ex in the song.
The fact that all the new tunes were co-written and produced by Jack Antonoff suggests there may have been rights issues over the tracks she wrote with Max Martin – who has not been involved with the new re-recordings.
That means the vault tracks are all bathed in the dreamy, soft-focus atmospherics of Out Of The Woods, rather than the upfront pop of Shake It Off.
How else does Taylor’s Version compare?
The Telegraph called it an “impeccable remake of her best album – with five clever new songs”.
In a five-star review, Neil McCormick wrote: “Without its five new tracks, this album would be almost indistinguishable from the 2014 version, which marked the then 24-year-old’s shift from country sweetheart to mainstream pop idol, and is her best album to date.”
He added: “Nevertheless, Swift doesn’t quite set the clock back a whole decade. On the remade album, Swift has gone out of her way to match the tones and inflections of her younger self.
“On the new tracks, the timbre of Swift’s voice has become noticeably deeper and richer, and her singing glides a little more smoothly than it did before.”
The Times’ Will Hodgkinson also offered five-stars for the new, extended recording of “her first pure pop album”, calling it “a triumph”.
“Now 1989 comes with a faithful new rendering and a handful of unheard tracks from the vaults, which is where the interest is here. Slut! is a classic Swiftian love song, winsome but troubled and not entirely serious.”
The new version of 1989 made Financial Times critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney change his mind about the importance of Swift’s “magnum opus”.
“The album documents young adulthood, the most exhilarating and error-strewn period of a person’s life, in the highly engineered setting of the perfect pop song,” he wrote.
“This theme continues on the tracks that didn’t make it on to the original album, which are now included on 1989 (Taylor’s Version). They’re almost all about love affairs going wrong.”
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Why has she released a new version?
This is the latest part of an ongoing campaign to regain control of her work after Braun bought her former label Big Machine.
At the time, she accused him of “bullying” and attempting to “dismantle” her “musical legacy”, adding: “This is my worst case scenario.”
He then sold her master tapes on to an investment fund.
She has been re-recording and re-releasing her first six albums one by one as “Taylor’s Versions”.
Re-recording them means that under the term of her new record deal, Swift owns the rights to these recordings.
The first three, Fearless, Red and Speak Now, all went to the top of the UK album chart, with the latter arriving in July. Now, only two others are still to be re-released – Taylor Swift and Reputation.
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